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It was my pleasure to get the email from Saikeo, one of the translation validator of Lao version of WordPress saying that he and the university he’d graduated would invite me to Vientiane, Laos to have a WordPress meetup.

I am very happy that I could meet all of you and that we shared my experiences.

After I got the invitation, I began thinking what I should share with you in the first WordPress meetup in Laos.

From what I heard from Saikeo,

there are no experienced WordPress developer at least at the meetup

students mainly belong to the faculty of engineering in the national university of Laos

you are learning programing languages such as java, VB .net and a little php

no WordPress courses

The wants I guessed you might have were,

How to install WordPress

How to use WordPress

How to create websites

How to make a original themes

and it turned out to be right when I asked you in the meetup.

But I did not talk anything around how-to’s or tech topics.

Instead, I decided to share the experience of mine and other WordPress people.

WordPress has changed my and my family’s life, and I know that it did so to other people’s lives. I know WordPress can do so to your lives, too.

I summarized what happened to my life after I found WordPress and brought the words by interviewing WordPress people from Asian countries who run global businesses.

I thought The most helpful thing I could pass you was the hope, passion and enthusiasm to learn WordPress and build your future by yourselves.

I talked about the time I was learning html/css/javascript/photoshop/illustrator and WordPress, which was the period I just lost my job and we were expecting our first daughter. I remember that this “no money for half a year” part was most exciting part in my talk.

I shared the words by my WordPress friends in Asian countries. One example was by Sakin from catchthemes.com.

Today, 25% of the world’s websites are in WordPress, and anyone can contribute to the ecosystem, from anywhere in the world.

This sentence was of course a surprise to the students.

You don’t have to be a hard-core programmer to be successful.
You don’t need an academic degree.
The barrier to entry is very low.

This is very true, because I’m not at all a talented programmer, I have no academic degree, and WordPress community welcomed me when I was a early stage learner.

After sharing the experiences of mine and others, I addressed 3 things I think are important for the you to learn if you want to follow the WP people.

learning coding skills. html/css/javascript, php, and WordPress way.

learning how to learn. finding the right resources.

English

I remember the reactions you made when I said the most important thing was English. You were both surprised and a little bit disappointed. Maybe you don’t feel comfortable in learning it.

From my experience, English is a really big key to open the door. And it is much more important for you, students in Laos to be able to read and speak English if we look at the amount of resources, activeness of community, and the size of market.

Here, I want to suggest you again what will make your WordPress life happier. Have a meetup group and run meetups regularly. The topics can be anything. Maybe you don’t even need a topic. You don’t need to have a teacher at the meetup. No one need to stand on stage and speak. You can just gather and learn together, share your knowledge, google things and install WordPress.

Help Needed

I want to ask the community people in the world to go to Laos and join meetups. Contact person can be me or Saikeo. Topics can be installing, translating, theming and so on!

After the main session, I had a little talk in Thai about the WP communities in Japan. I talked about WordBench and people’s help and volunteer spirits and asked for help to organize the future meetups.

Now we have a team of 20 Thai people to organize the meetups. We are now exchanging ideas of the future meetups. I wish they will be the future leaders and there will be more events and community. I hope I can bring something similar to what I got at the community in Japan.

Looking a short look at WordPress.com and see how similar/different it is from .org and.The next meetup will be on underscores ( _s )Mr. Menn talked about almost all the criteria a theme need to fulfill.After the sessionThe community grows slowly and nicely!

The topic was more about business model than tech, and the guests were 2 co-founder of Pronto Marketing.

Pronto Marketing is a company with 70+ employees based in Bangkok which offers website/marketing solutions for small business owners in US, Canada and other English speaking countries.

For clients, they create really nice design websites, write everything, mail customers’ customers, host WordPress and keep it always updated and more. Shortly, they do almost everything that a small business would need for their websites and give the clients time to concentrate on their own business. They charge basically $247 per month.

The talk title was “Get involved in WordPress”, was about how to contribute to WordPress and here’s a list of hows (I made memo of the talk but couldn’t write them all so I researched by myself too. It’s a bit different from Siobhan’s talk.)

Handbooks are the new documentations. There are two kinds of handbooks, for Developers and for Contributors.

Inline Documentations are docs in the core files. It’s a nice way of getting involved for you who understand code if you read, but maybe it’s difficult to write patches with codes. Inline documentations will not only be just inside the core files but also will be extracted from core to new website.

Somebody wants to turn wordpress.org web site into responsive?

And off course the core. It maybe fun to look at WordPress core components because there you can choose topic you want to try.

About Genesis Framework

I was working on my original theme. A theme to be the parent theme of my future works and here is the concept image.

click the image to see detail

many original action / filter hooks

widget areas everywhere

custom menus everywhere

compatible with breadcrumb / pagination plugin

This was intended to be easy to customize, no html coding and less php coding. Now, here is the structure of Genesis plugin.

click image to see the captioned web page.

The concept looks very similar. They’ve gone far.

They have a community and plenty of child themes. Nice to know that there were people who thought similar as I did. To avoid reinventing something and to learn from former efforts and ideas, I will have a look at the theme, the child themes and documentations.

I had a hangout meeting with my client in Japan. They say that it’s really cold in Toyama, Japan. It’s snowing and one man said that he caught cold. I come up on their screen with a T-shirt on me, nice green garden behind me and bird song as BGM 😮

I and my family went to see a friend’s grand mother and ate lunch together while our friend was out in Taiwan and Hong-Kong for his business. Children seemed happy to run around in the garden and to talk with a Obaachan.

Aim introduced to me Bow, who works for clients using WordPress. I talked about community activities in Japan and told that I want to have similar community here, too. Fortunately, we can do it together and I’m really happy.

At night Aim took us to Barcrawl, which is an event Aim take Hubba people to 9 bars and clubs local people go & drink & dance. I absolutely drank too much but it was really interesting to see Thai people drink around. Amazing that all the bars and clubs are so nice and big and bright and rich and expensive. You can see the economy here is growing and people are enjoying the growth.

I’m developing 6 WordPress themes at the same time for one client and it’s really hard that I can do almost nothing more than them. I wake up and WordPress, I eat lunch and WordPress and WordPress before sleep.

I met a friend and went for lunch. I came to know him at the WordPress meet-up. He’d read the anngle post. He took me to a very nice Thai restaurant.

They have many pots and pans full of delicious Thai foods and we choose from them what we want on our plate or bowl. It costs only 50-70 Baht. It’s a little bit more expensive than other restaurants but it’s much more delicious.

He took me to a nice cafe too.

The cafe people were really nice. They had Japanese elementary school desk and chair set, which they’ve bought at a second hand store. Other stuff in this cafe were pretty and nice.

I’ll take my wife here when kids go to kindergarten, that is, next year.

I had a Thai lesson presented by the coworking space staff. It was really nice that they had a special paper fot the class and very kind and patient. Nice that we can ask everything.

I write Thai alphabets every night but my problem is that I don’t have enough opportunity to talk Thai. I need to do something about this big problem. Maybe having a Youtube program of Thai lesson?